The International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC-Africa) has called for the mobilization of technology to advance humanity.
Speaking exclusively to Voice of Nigeria on the sidelines of the two-day National Dialogue on “Promoting sustainable and responsible business practices for the realization of decent work in Nigeria,” which held in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital, the General Secretary of ITUC-Africa, Joel Odigie, said that workers are ready to embrace new technologies.
While addressing the participants, Odigie stressed that for organised labour, the advent of artificial intelligence is a welcome development, adding that “that is where the rest of the world is at now and labour cannot shy away from it or live in denial.”
Voice of Nigeria in an interview asked him if the African workforce is really ready for AI.
“It’s in our faces, we’ve been told that even smart phones have a limited lifespan, that in the next two, three or four years at most, smart phones will be pumped up, will be on our hands. So these realities are here.
“We see them every day, so we are not a movement that denies reality and live in denial, no, we are saying if we can mobilise technology to the advancement of humanity, why not? And that is the underlying word, and I need to be quoted.
“Advancing technology, mobilizing technology for the advancement of humanity, workers are the body of humanity. If you advance technology to the sense that technology can work for us, who says it’s a problem? But not a situation where technology makes us redundant and technology makes us poorer, technology makes us completely out of the scheme of things, and it enriches less than 1% of people under the name of intellectual property rights,” he said.
He said that technology must be developed in such a way that it produces services where workers are richer and the commonwealth can be shared to everybody and shelter can be provided on the scores of that.
Answering the question on whether Labour in Africa and particularly Nigeria have the intellectual ability to understand this advocacy about welcoming AI, Comrade Odigie was emphatic in his response as he said, “let’s not confuse it, already, again, I repeat myself, AI is already on and it’s already taking jobs.
“As we speak, even you Journalists, you are using AI now. You are using it to write your story.
“This my discussion with you, what you do now, you just feed it to an AI app, and it will give you a well-written form. You don’t need to start writing again what we have discussed. All you might need to do is to look at a perspective that you want to edit here and there.
“What are we talking about? First is that, let’s not live in denial. Secondly, to be ready, the opportunity must be even,” he said.
While calling for a regulated AI advancement, the ITUC-Africa Scribe insisted that there is global inequality of technology.
“So a digital world is a digital world for the first world nations and we need to reconfigure these ideas. That’s why I say regulation.
“If this technology must come to our economies, we must regulate them, not in that way that they come, make profit, and the profits are expropriated without paying enough taxes that can assuage for the losses of the jobs. But more importantly, in terms of being ready, we need to re-skill our people.
“We need to expand our social protection safety nets. From taxing, from regulation, we will have more resources, more monies, to be able to address the gaps, the injustices that will come, because these things are here.
“These things will happen but when you provide safe gap for people, they don’t need to fall out of job and fall into penury. No problem,” he stated.
Talking about re-skilling the workforce both in Nigeria and other African countries, he responded in the affirmative that deliberate steps have been taken to prepare their members.
“The greatest thing we oppose is change, but it’s the most inevitable, because it will always happen, but we must prepare our people for change. And this is what we are saying, that training is critical to this process.
“Re-skilling is critical to this process and that’s why we are telling employers, invest in it,” he added.